nms is a project that was started by the London Perl Mongers. Its goal is to provide drop-in replacements for the scripts found at Matt's Script Archive. These scripts have been developed from the ground up to emulate the behavior of Matt's free Perl scripts, with the caveat that you must run Perl 5.004_04 or later. Almost everyone does.

Matt's Script Archive does not provide support for or guarantee the quality of nms scripts. We are pleased to offer our users the choice of which version they would like to download, and in many cases the nms code is better written and more secure. Their code is released under the GPL and Artistic License allowing us to offer it here.

Why nms?!

Matt's Script Archive was one of the first sites on the Internet to offer Free CGI scripts that were well-documented and easy to install. These scripts were posted to the web beginning in 1995 when I was still in high school. Having no formal programming education or experience at that time, I released the code as I learned, hoping others would find it useful.

Over the years, this software has been downloaded millions of times and FormMail has become the most widely used CGI script on the Internet. Most of the scripts at Matt's Script Archive ceased to be updated after 1996, with the exception of major security flaws or bugs. This certainly did not deter from their continued use as thousands of people continue to visit and download the scripts daily.

While the free code found at my web site has not evolved much in recent years, the general programming practices and standards of CGI programs have. nms is an attempt by very active programmers in the Perl community to bring the quality of code for these types of programs up to date and eliminate some of the bad programming practices and bugs found in the existing Matt's Script Archive code.

I would highly recommend downloading the nms versions if you wish to learn CGI programming. The code you find at Matt's Script Archive is not representative of how even I would code these days. My interests and activies have moved on, however, and I just have not found the time to update all of my scripts. One of the major reasons for this is that they work for many people. For this reason, I will continue to provide them to the public, but am also pleased to make you aware of well-coded alternatives.

Download nms Programs

Matt's Script Archive provides the following files from the nms Project for your download. They are distributed under the GPL or Artistic License. Information on support or contributing to the nms Project can be found within these files: